The Summer of Hope
by Love-el-ly Joy
Summary: Joyce looks through Buffy's room, looking for photographs, but what she doesn't find is far more treasured than what she does. Post-Season Two summer, when Buffy was in L.A. One-shot.


_A/N: Since this is my last week of school before summer vacation, I've decided to write a little fic in honor of summer. Even though I hate the summer vacation time. I get extraordinarily bored. Except when I'm at camp, because camp is FUN! I totally heart camp and my camp friends that so willingly listen to my drabbles about my life over e-mail and IM. If you're one of them and you're reading this, just know that it was a shout-out. You know who you are. So I dedicate this love-el-ly one-shot to you. Again, you know who you are - you scared the tuna salad out of me ;-)_

_A Summer of Hope_

Joyce walked around Buffy's room, opening doors and dresser drawers at random, looking for pictures. Pictures of anything to remind her of her daughter - photos of her friends in L.A., pictures of her new friends here in Sunnydale, baby pictures, God, even pictures of Angel. Those ones, though, Joyce wanted to burn rather than clutch in her hand and sob over.

Just the thought of Angel made Joyce exceedingly angry. If Buffy were to fall for a vampire, couldn't it even be one like Spike? Joyce met him twice, and both times he seemed to genuinely like her daughter. Buffy and Spike had obvious chemistry.

Joyce tried to imagine being in Buffy's shoes: being a teenager, falling in love, being responsible for your boyfriend turning evil and attempting to destroy the world. Being the only one that had a chance of stopping yet another apocalypse. She couldn't guess what happened after that since Buffy came, packed some stuff in a duffel bag, and left without seeing or speaking a word to Joyce. She left a note, though, which made Joyce angry. How dare Buffy think of her but not even bother to say good-bye? She must have gotten that from her father's side of the family because Joyce would never do such a thing. She wouldn't even run away in the first place.

All the same, Joyce couldn't do anything but hope. Hope that Buffy had fallen in with good people that were taking care of her; that she wasn't some homeless person lying on a sidewalk in New York City, begging for change. That she hadn't gotten into drugs or alcohol; that she hadn't been kidnapped or hurt in any way. Perhaps - just perhaps - Buffy missed her. Maybe Buffy missed her so much that she would come home soon, even if just for a square meal and then back off. Joyce could live with that. Even just being able to say good-bye to Buffy would make up for all the time that they wouldn't be together.

Joyce didn't know why she told Rupert that she blamed him. She didn't. In reality, she blamed Willow. Willow for making Buffy believe that she and Angel could work through it all; that they could be together when it was impossible. _A true forbidden love, _Joyce thought bitterly. But she couldn't very well tell a seventeen-year-old that it was her fault that her best friend was sleeping in a gutter and waking up with spiders and cockroaches making a home in her hair. There had to be someone that she could verbally blame that was emotionally mature enough to take it and know that it wasn't true; that it wasn't what she really thought. Rupert was intelligent; he could pick up on that. But Willow hadn't yet developed the inner radar that sensed whether Joyce was serious or not.

Finally, Joyce found something in Buffy's closet, in a box on the top shelf: diaries. Six of them. They had dates on them: _December 9, 1988-November 16, 1989; November 17, 1989-December 28, 1990; January 3, 1991-December 6, 1991; December 6, 1991-October 31, 1992; November 16, 1992-February 4, 1994, _and _February 5, 1994-January 28, 1995. _The rest were missing. Buffy must have taken them.

Wait. Wasn't 1995 the year that - ?

Joyce went downstairs to her folder in which she kept old medical histories, hospital admission bills (there were quite a few of them), and receipts from picking up prescriptions. She flipped to a spot near the middle where early 1995 would be. Where Buffy's statement of admission to the mental hospital used to be was empty, instead replaced by some kind of headache medicine that was recalled before Joyce had a chance to use it.

Buffy tried to remove all evidence of her being a Slayer.

Joyce began to cry at the thoughtfulness of the gesture. Buffy thought that Joyce didn't want to deal with Buffy's being the Slayer, so she'd erased everything that could have suggested that she was one. Joyce would be willing to bet that she'd taken all bloodstained clothes as well.

"Buffy," Joyce whispered. "How could you think that I would ever mind you being the Slayer?" A tear fell down her face. Soon they were falling in torrents and Joyce's face looked like a car window after it went through the car wash. "You can come home now, sweetie."


End file.
